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A report from the tutorial of CIGRE study committee B5 at the 2026 Paris session. Three renowned experts — Alex Apostolov (PAC World / OMICRON), Ratan Das (Siemens Energy, convener of the IEEE C37.300 working group) and David MacDonald (GE Grid Automation, convener of CIGRE WG B5.84) — arranged their talks into a single historical sequence: process bus → centralised protection → virtualisation. The protection function turns into a software application, and the server into a computing platform that can be replaced without changing the protection algorithm.
A report from the exhibition floor of CIGRE 2026 in Paris. The main theme for us was the virtualisation of protection — and it is no longer a single experimental product. Some offer virtualised protection functions, others the substation servers to run them on, others assemble multi-vendor vPAC architectures on the open platforms. The key question has shifted: no longer «can protection run in a virtual machine», but who defines the hardware architecture and answers for the reliability of the computing platform.
"Shall support IEC 61850" is too general a wording. We look at where to check IEC 61850 conformance certificates today, what a conformance certificate really confirms, how a registry of 1,650 test records is structured by editions and roles, the seven parameters to check in a certificate, and how conformance testing differs from interoperability testing — and how to phrase a requirement in a specification instead of a vague phrase about "standard support".
Siemens announced SIPROTEC V at DISTRIBUTECH 2026 — a software-defined protection and control system consolidating up to 60 hardware IEDs on a single server. We look at what changes for substation engineers, and what Siemens has not yet disclosed.
Top-down IEC 61850 engineering — formalized in TR IEC 61850-90-30:2025 and TR IEC 61850-7-6 (Ed. 2) — moves specification errors from commissioning to the design phase, before a single IED is selected or procured. This article explains the mechanics of the five-step process: what each step produces, what files are exchanged, and why the sequence achieves outcomes the conventional bottom-up approach cannot.
ENTSO-E's 472-page final report on the April 28, 2025 blackout in Spain and Portugal identifies systemic failures in voltage control, protection settings, and distributed generation visibility — not a single technology — as the root causes of the largest European grid incident in over two decades.
The UCA IUG conformance registry documents 1,650 test records across three IEC 61850 editions. To read the numbers, you need to know the policy behind them: who sets the transition deadlines, when Edition 2-only testing ended, and why 2023 produced a record spike. This article traces the process.
In 2023, fourteen European TSOs signed a common statement on IEC 61850 engineering and demonstrated a working proof of concept. Their five-step top-down process — backed by two new IEC technical reports — changes how utilities, IED suppliers, and tool vendors interact. Here is what they built and why it matters.